Pre-Christmas

To get ready for Christmas, we spent a lot of time in the car looking at Christmas lights. This was Jackson's favorite thing to do. One evening, we went into Scottsdale to the train park to ride the train through the lights. It was crazy crowded, but so worth the wait. There were so many lights and other fun things to do. Mostly Mikelle waited in line while the kids and Bobby did all the fun things!!

Here are Jackson's awesome antlers he made at our ward Christmas party. This year they did a brunch, and everyone came in jammies. It was a great idea and went really well. The one down side was that a little girl got sick in the middle of it, and guess who was sick all the next week? We hate the "choke-up" bug around here. (That's what Jackson calls it).

Grandma Halterman gave Jackson his own gingerbread house to decorate. He loved it. Mikelle helped, but just by putting the frosting where he wanted it. He was very creative, even made a little garden in front, I'm sure just for his Papa!

We took the kids to see Santa, and of course Jackson did great, and Brooklyn freaked out!  But we took them to Arizona Mills, where they had this cool sand castle for Santa's Village. It was real sand. Santa even sat on a sand chair. Too cool, especially for AZ.

This was Christmas Eve day. We went for a hike up South Mountain. The kids loved it, although Brooklyn would have preferred to walk. It was a little steep and rocky though for that. It was a gorgeous day. Unseasonable warm here in Phoenix, that means unseasonably cool for the summer, right?!